WordPressGarage.com now on WPGarage.com, and how to move a domain with a 301 redirect on WordPress

About a year ago, a discussion arose in the WordPress community about third-party sites that use the word “WordPress” in their domain name. We posted our opinion on this issue since WP Garage has been running (until yesterday) on a domain with the word WordPress in it. We put WordPress in our domain to show our ever-growing love for WordPress, but realized how important it is to the founders of WordPress that we take out their brand name, so yesterday we finally moved this blog to WPGarage.com instead. Come on over and take a look.

During the process, we had to do a 301 redirect from WordPressGarage.com to WPGarage.com in order to retain traffic from inbound links and search engines. It’s important in this type of situation to do a 301 permanent redirect so that all of the new pages on the new site are seen by the search engines as equivalent in terms of value and ranking as the old site.

We followed Yoast’s guide for how to Move your WordPress blog to a new domain in 10 steps! which was very helpful. However, along the way, we realized that there are a few things in his directions that might not be clear to readers (they weren’t so clear to us at times), so here are some things to pay attention to when doing a 301 redirect for a WordPress blog:

Put the robots.txt on the new domain.

Copy the database and files to the new domain.

Edit wp-config.php on the new domain to have the right database settings as described by Yoast.

Now set up your new blog install, with the same settings as on the old domain. If you import the database it will retain pretty much all of your settings from the old site.

Yoast says to remove the robots.txt file. We left it but removed the slash after the word Disallow.

The code Joost gives to put in your .htaccess file refers to a site moving from a sub-directory on one domain to a the root directory on another domain. It might not be clear what you need to use if you’re moving from the root directory of one domain to the root directory of another. So, on your old blog, add one of the the following lines to your apache .htaccess or vhost-config:

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Redirect301/blog/http://www.<strong>new</strong>domain.com/<em>

Thisisifyou're moving from domain.com/blog to domain.com</em>

<strong>OR</strong>

Redirect 301 / http://www.<strong>new</strong>domain.com/<em>

This is if you're moving from olddomain.com tonewdomain.com</em>

IMPORTANT NOTE: Don’t underestimate the importance of the slash and spacing. In Yoast’s example, we took out the entire /blog/ part of the line and the old site would only forward to the homepage of the new site. Luckily, we found this article which showed the importance of the slash placement.

Joost says to remove the old blog and database. I’m not sure if I would do that so quickly.

Change your FeedBurner account, if you have one, to pick up the correct feed and continue delivering it to subscribers..Note: You can only change the Feed Title and Original Feed. You can’t change or “redirect” the Feed Address itself.

Test it out and hope Google figures things out and displays your new site in the serps.

Rebecca Markowitz has built over 100 WordPress sites for clients as Web Project Manager and WordPress specialist at illuminea. illuminea is a Jerusalem-based boutique web agency. WPGarage shows my dedicated relationship with WordPress over the years - full of love, laughs, tears, growth and strong drinks. L'chaim!

Why do you use an .htaccess redirect? Joost needed to do that in his post as he was redirecting a sub-folder. However you were redirecting the entire domain so you should have been able to do it via the domain itself.

Thanks for this post. I have to make the same transition in the coming week or so, so it’s very timely. It’s weird – I’ve worked with WordPress, WordPress sites and been pretty active in the community for a few years now – and I didn’t notice this policy until I register a domain name with wordpress in it and get started on the site. Oh well.

But our move to the new domain didn’t go entirely smoothly. For some reason Google Analytics isn’t tracking traffic to the new site. The tracking code is there, but something is stopping it from working. Ugh.

Huh, that’s pretty weird. When I’ve switched domains in the past GA has corrected itself. You can edit the settings in analytics itself to update the domain – have you tried that? If yes, the only thing I can think of is to re-generate or re-validate your site. If you figure it out I would love to hear what the problem was for future reference.

I came across this policy today. Therefore, it looks like I will need to do this.
1) How long must I keep paying for the old domain? That is if I cancel it next year or in two years will I lose Google juice if I ever cancel this domain?
2) If I do cancel this old domain all the people linking to it need to be rewritten?
3) I wish I knew about this before.

@Mark
1. As long as you want to keep receiving PR from the old links you will need to keep the old domain. Once the domain is gone, those links will die and hence can’t help you out SEO wise.
2. Yes, all old links would need to be replaced since they wouldn’t be pointing anywhere

I hope that link in your comment above is not the site you are referring to since it appears to be a site about WP SEO, lol!

That is what I thought, however, a self proclaimed expert told me to the contrary. I agree with you and conventional wisdom that I will have to write anyone with a link I have to keep paying for the domain. It is more a hobby site so I might just delete it.
I am trying to consolidate my smaller sites, WP be always interesting but it is a matter of time.

He (the expert whose makes money from consulting with WordPress and Typepad) just said once you redirect your site, the PR and Google juice will eventually flow to your new site (Site 2) and Google will get the hint and you no longer will need to keep site 1 open as Google will understand what has happened.
This I agreed with him. However, I made the point that was true as long as you keep the links pointing to site number 1, eventually they will need to be change the links to site 2 if you want to keep that juice flowing. If you cancel site 1 without this change in links then the redirect benefits will mostly be lost. I have no idea how he could not understand this but – he did not believe me.
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For a site that did not have much PR and age, I have simply moved the content and wrote my linkers to change their links if they wanted. I cancelled domain 1 (I want to start scaling down the number of domains I use) and in about 3 or 4 months things were back to normal in site 2 without a redirect.
I know people would cringe at this but I am curious about your opinion about by passing the redirection.

About WPGarage

This is where Rebecca and Miriam from illuminea (and sometimes others) document things they've learned about WordPress. Even after nine years in the field, we're always learning new things about WordPress. Hope this helps you too.